September 26th, 2017

Parts 1 through 3 of this four-part series on developing Web services in Java SE first presented an overview of Web services and Java SE’s support for developing them. The series then focused on developing SOAP-based and RESTful Web services via this support. Part 4 wraps up this series by focusing on advanced topics.

This article first introduces Java SE’s SAAJ API for working with SOAP-based Web services at a lower level. It then discusses how to create a JAX-WS … Read the rest

September 7th, 2017

JavaScript Object Notation is a schema-less, text-based representation of structured data that is based on key-value pairs and ordered lists. Although JSON is derived from JavaScript, it is supported either natively or through libraries in most major programming languages. JSON is commonly, but not exclusively, used to exchange information between web clients and web servers.

Over the last 15 years, JSON has become ubiquitous on the web. Today it is the format of choice for almost every publicly available web … Read the rest

August 28th, 2017

Today, Structured Query Language is the standard means of manipulating and querying data in relational databases, though with proprietary extensions among the products. The ease and ubiquity of SQL have even led the creators of many “NoSQL” or non-relational data stores, such as Hadoop, to adopt subsets of SQL or come up with their own SQL-like query languages.

But SQL wasn’t always the “universal” language for relational databases. From the beginning (circa 1980), SQL had certain strikes … Read the rest

August 2nd, 2017

There’s now a JavaScript library for executing neural networks inside a webpage, using the hardware-accelerated graphics API available in modern web browsers.

Developed by a team of MIT graduate students, TensorFire can run TensorFlow-style machine learning models on any GPU, without requiring the GPU-specific middleware typically needed by machine learning libraries such as Keras-js.

TensorFire is another step towards making machine learning available to the broadest possible audience, using hardware and software people are already likely to possess, and … Read the rest

July 31st, 2017

Several years into widespread JavaScript fatigue, the front-end ecosystem isn’t getting any smaller or simpler. The world of front-end testing is also expanding, and the tools tend to be opinionated from framework to framework. This is sort of a double-edged sword. One the one hand, picking a framework narrows the testing options we have to choose from. On the other hand, testing stacks are less portable across frameworks, so we may have to learn a whole new set of tools … Read the rest

June 22nd, 2017

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime, built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, that’s suitable for implementing both desktop and server apps. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient compared to threaded servers, such as Apache, IIS, and your typical Java server.

While you can implement a web server or app entirely in plain Node.js code, an MVC framework can greatly reduce the amount of code you need to write. MVC (model-view-controller) is a paradigm intended … Read the rest

The planned update to the popular enterprise language and platform is set to offer a world of new capabilities. Among these are modularity, an experimental version of ahead-of-time compilation, and a REPL (read-eval-print-loop). But the release keeps getting stalled by the major overhaul required for modularization.

May 30th, 2017

NPM, the popular JavaScript package manager, is being upgraded for better performance.

Expected to be released tomorrow, NPM Version 5.0 is two to six times faster than NPM 4, said Kat Marchan, a member of the NPM team. Other improvements include better defaults, simplified options, and better error messages.

NPM’s cache has been rewritten for speed. It also is fault-tolerant and supports concurrent access. Corrupted cache entries are automatically removed and refetched. Also, an NPM cache verify command performs garbage … Read the rest

May 25th, 2017

Andrew Sorensen got a degree in classical music in 2013, but he didn’t want to perform or teach. After finishing college, he tried his hand at sales and worked for a while at a Bellevue, Wash., car dealership, where he sold Audis, many to software engineers.

Today, Sorensen is one of those software engineers, thanks to three intense months at a local coding school, Coding Dojo. The training landed him an entry-level job at Expedia where the 26-year-old makes … Read the rest

May 17th, 2017

JavaScript programmers have many good tools to choose from—almost too many to keep track of. In this article, I discuss 10 text editors with good support for developing with JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS, and for documenting with Markdown. Why use an editor for JavaScript programming instead of an IDE? In a word: speed.

The essential difference between editors and IDEs is that IDEs can debug and sometimes profile your code, and IDEs have support for application lifecycle management (ALM) systems. … Read the rest